The firm is a fundamental economic unit of contemporary human societies. Studies on the general quantitative and statistical character of firms have produced mixed results regarding their lifespans and mortality. We examine a comprehensive database of more than 25 000 publicly traded North American companies, from 1950 to 2009, to derive the statistics of firm lifespans. Based on detailed survival analysis, we show that the mortality of publicly traded companies manifests an approximately constant hazard rate over long periods of observation. This regularity indicates that mortality rates are independent of a company's age. We show that the typical half-life of a publicly traded company is about a decade, regardless of business sector. Our results shed new light on the dynamics of births and deaths of publicly traded companies and identify some of the necessary ingredients of a general theory of firms.Madeleine I. G. Daepp , Marcus J. Hamilton , Geoffrey B. West , Luís M. A. Bettencourt. The mortality of companies. Royal Society Interface, 2015 http://dx.doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2015.0120 ;
Via Complexity Digest

The annual European Conferences on Complex Systems (ECCS) have become a major venue for the Complex Systems Community since they were started in 2003. For the first time, this year, the conference will be held in North America to foster and multiply contacts between the European, North American and Asian communities working in this domain. CCS’15 will be a major international conference and event in the area of complex systems and interdisciplinary science in general. The conference will offer unique opportunities to study novel scientific approaches in a multitude of application areas, as reflected by the conference tracks:Conference Main Tracks - Foundations of Complex Systems (complex networks, self-organization, nonlinear dynamics, statistical physics, mathematical modeling, simulation) - Information and Communication Technologies (Internet, WWW, search, semantic web) - Language, Linguistics, Cognition and Social Systems (evolution of language, social consensus, artificial intelligence, cognitive processes) - Economics and Finance (social networks, game theory, stock market, crises) - Infrastructure, Planning and Environment (critical infrastructures, urban planning, mobility, transport, energy) - Biological Complexity (biological networks, systems biology, evolution, natural science, medicine and physiology) - Social Ecological Systems (global environmental change, green growth, sustainability, resilience) Important Dates15 April, 2015: Deadline for submission of satellite session proposals. 30 April, 2015: Deadline for submission of abstracts for papers, ignites, and posters.15 May, 2015: Notification to satellite session organizers. 1 June, 2015: Notification to authors of papers, ignites, and posters.15 August, 2015: Final abstracts due in electronic form.28 September - 2 October, 2015: Conference in Tempe, Arizonahttp://www.ccs2015.org
Via Complexity Digest

“ The Economy. Everyone’s talking about it, but who can explain it? 20 award­-winning directors and 10 of our most respected economists add their voice to the chorus with a thought­-provoking short­-film series.”
Via Chris Gardner, jon inge, Bruce Fellowes

the short film starts off as if you've clicked the wrong link and you have no idea how this accidentally got here however the video becomes interesting. The sweet alpacas demonstrate income inequality, All the alpacas set out to start their first jobs. The first alpaca, happy, was automatically granted a six figure job in a laid back area due to her fathers status. The second alpaca went to engineering school and was granted a low income job. The last alpaca wasn't even granted a job due to her not going to a fancy school. The video connects to AP gov. because the three alpacas were much like the trend of the economy and market over the years. One's views could be altered because how the economy works is revealed in a negative yet truthful way. The information could indeed be categorized as reliable due to its depth of explanation and several examples.

“Sway is a novel tool for building cloud based presentations. Sway offers a rapid design experience, focusing on the collation of images, text, and video, sourced from the web or your computer. It's a canvas for your ideas, quick to create, and easy to share. Sway is still in closed preview, but we were lucky enough to have been pulled out…”
Via Baiba Svenca

Complexity, Governance, and Networks aims to contribute to the philosophical, theoretical, methodological, and empirical developments in complexity, governance, and network studies in public administration, public policy, politics, and non-governmental organizations. The journal publishes primarily theoretical essays and original research papers. http://www.cgnj.infoFirst Issue at http://www.cgnj.info/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=164%3Atoc-cgn-01-2014&catid=49%3Acomplexity-governance-networks&Itemid=213〈=en
Via Complexity Digest

Tired of sending out the same old static PDFs, spreadsheets or links from Google Docs? Use Silk to make a fully interactive site that engages users and encourages them to play with your data.
Via Baiba Svenca

Last fall, Caltech and The Feynman Lectures Website joined forces to create an online edition of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. They started with Volume 1. And now they've followed up with Volume 2 and Volume 3, making the collection complete.
Via Luca Baptista

Yes, Barb's insights are right on target. I have been using EdPuzzle and find it easy to use and providing a complete package for teachers who want to ascertain which students viewed the video, answered the embedded questions, which questions were answered correctly or what did they understand from the video! Highly recommend.

Yes, Barb's insights are right on target. I have been using EdPuzzle and find it easy to use and providing a complete package for teachers who want to ascertain which students viewed the video, answered the embedded questions, which questions were answered correctly or what did they understand from the video! Highly recommend.

For teachers interested in transforming their social studies classroom from the traditional mode to a more digitally based curriculum will find this fascinating. The ability to convert old PowerPoint presentations into videos that can be directly uploaded to YouTube are a tremendous offering. Creating and crafting your own podcast channel via YouTube is a terrific way of allowing your lessons to go home with the class and allows you more time in class to spend engaging students in the content!

Aim of this paper is to introduce the complex system perspective into retail market analysis. Currently, to understand the retail market means to search for local patterns at the micro level, involving the segmentation, separation and profiling of diverse groups of consumers. In other contexts, however, markets are modelled as complex systems. Such strategy is able to uncover emerging regularities and patterns that make markets more predictable, e.g. enabling to predict how much a country’s GDP will grow. Rather than isolate actors in homogeneous groups, this strategy requires to consider the system as a whole, as the emerging pattern can be detected only as a result of the interaction between its self-organizing parts. This assumption holds also in the retail market: each customer can be seen as an independent unit maximizing its own utility function. As a consequence, the global behaviour of the retail market naturally emerges, enabling a novel description of its properties, complementary to the local pattern approach. Such task demands for a data-driven empirical framework. In this paper, we analyse a unique transaction database, recording the micro-purchases of a million customers observed for several years in the stores of a national supermarket chain. We show the emergence of the fundamental pattern of this complex system, connecting the products’ volumes of sales with the customers’ volumes of purchases. This pattern has a number of applications. We provide three of them. By enabling us to evaluate the sophistication of needs that a customer has and a product satisfies, this pattern has been applied to the task of uncovering the hierarchy of needs of the customers, providing a hint about what is the next product a customer could be interested in buying and predicting in which shop she is likely to go to buy it.

With this knowledge and insight into the world that's dawning. One world must be destroyed in order for the new world to come forth; one segment of society must give way to the new in order to facilitate and ease this transition.

The top of society is where and what determines the ease or the possibility of this transition. That is the point that needs to be altered in order to bring about this new dawn.

Unfortunately, it is the point in society that is least willing, although most capable of change. They'll cling to illusions and delusions of relative power over people and unsustainable material wealth than allow for everyone, including themselves, to realize something that could truly be wonderful for our lives, our well-being, and our health as living organisms. This is before we talk about the bottom-up resistance that will be experienced as well, especially if the transition is done badly by the people who are at the top of the given social unit. A shame that something so relatively simple can be so completely complicated and complex to carry out.

Explain Everything is a whiteboard and screencasting app that makes creating interactive lessons a simple proposition. Its full-featured editing options and its import/export functions allow it to stand apart from the other competitors
Via Baiba Svenca

I don't usually include tools that cost, but Explain Everything is one app I was willing to purchase with my money. It lets you record a presentation and then export is as a mp4 to your camera roll, so you can share it with others. Great for the flipped classroom.

This paper presents an idealized design for a legislative system. The concept of idealized design is explained. The paper critiques two critical (and often taken for granted) features of the legislative branches of most contemporary democratic governments: legislators are chosen by election, and the same bodies perform all legislative and meta-legislative functions, for all laws. Seven problems with these two features are described. A new model of lawmaking is proposed, based on three concepts from ancient Athenian democracy — random selection, dividing legislative functions among multiple bodies, and the use of temporary bodies (like contemporary juries) for final decision making. The benefits of the model are laid out, and likely objections are addressed.
Via Bernard Ryefield

Though it may be true that we are moving toward a society where computer science knowledge will be as integrated as math and English in the primary school system, coding literacy is even more important for university undergraduates as they prepare for the competitive, technologically advanced, and evolving job market. It’s difficult for students to make sense of the hype around computer science, programming, and ‘hacking.’ Long-standing barriers between technical and non-technical folks create misunderstandings that conceal the true breadth of technology and its essential applications across all academic fields. University students should be encouraged to harness the potential of programming to expand opportunities in their fields. Even beyond practical usage, coding provides an alternate way of thinking. Employing logic through the mind of a computer forces rationality, brevity, and accuracy. Strong leaders harness interdisciplinary critical thinking by considering problems from within different mindsets (creative, mathematical, emotional, etectera) to form an optimized solution.
Via Susan Einhorn

Commerce knits the modern world together in a way that nothing else quite does. Almost anything you own these days is the result of a complicated web of global interactions. And there's no better way to depict those interactions than some maps.
Via Luca Baptista

In 12 exercises deploying only body weight, a chair and a wall, it fulfills the latest mandates for high-intensity effort, which essentially combines a long run and a visit to the weight room into about seven minutes of steady discomfort — all of it based on science.
Via Luca Baptista

Sharing your scoops to your social media accounts is a must to distribute your curated content. Not only will it drive traffic and leads through your content, but it will help show your expertise with your followers.

Integrating your curated content to your website or blog will allow you to increase your website visitors’ engagement, boost SEO and acquire new visitors. By redirecting your social media traffic to your website, Scoop.it will also help you generate more qualified traffic and leads from your curation work.

Distributing your curated content through a newsletter is a great way to nurture and engage your email subscribers will developing your traffic and visibility.
Creating engaging newsletters with your curated content is really easy.